Hmmm. I'm with you on the bureaucracy part, but I don't think it's just about money. You can't have a good school system without well paid teachers, good facilities and materials, and an environment that helps kids want to learn.

The town I live in is a "bedroom community" with little or no commercial tax base. Down the road a bit, is a wealthy town, with a lot of multi-million dollar mansions and a fairly good commercial tax base. Our town struggles to fund our schools, while the wealthy town has all the extras. Our kids still do well, mostly because we have a small group of dedicated teachers (unionized) who care. They aren't paid like the teachers in the wealthy town, and they are currently being strangled with more paperwork and requirements in order to remain licensed, thanks to the sentiment that "we need to weed out all the bad teachers" which is currently in vogue. Many older more experienced teachers are retiring, rather than put up with the additional burden.

What's my point? Education is in a crisis, but I strongly disagree that it's because of teacher unions, at least in my town. The "Kansas attitude", religious and political interference with curriculum, is one cause. The political push for constant testing and debate over metrics is another. The battle over Common Core is a third. It seems that the new attitude is to dumb down the curriculum, test more and then wonder why kids are still getting lower grades. Perhaps we should let the teachers work it out, instead of the politicians, demagogues and publishing companies?

Is Chelsea the sysop?

"Limited" monetary resources? Hah! Try "nonexistent"! Boston's budget for snow removal disappeared faster than the snow came down.

And two days is about right for the time it takes to fill a pothole...and the time it takes one to reappear after being filled! Talks about a thankless job. The roads are so heavilty travelled, they have to do it at night, when it's coldest.

There isn't even a central location to report the potholes, which are repaired by the individual towns, or the state, depending on who is responsible for that section of the roadway.

I once head about an app that sensed sudden Z-axis accelerations and used the GPS location to report potholes, but I have never seen it and it was probably a dream someone had.

Cheer up! Spring is on the way! I can see the grass over my septic tank again. The foot and a half of snow everywhere else and the six foot banks are going to take till June, though...

Top post. Nice. Boston says, "bring it on!". Commuting into Boston is not for the faint hearted. I've seen potholes this winter into which the Google self-driving car would fit nicely.

To the religious fundamentalists, this is just more proof that Satan and his evil hoardes place false evidence to lure those whose faith is not solid away from Biblical truth.

The Chinese media distribution system is days more efficient at distributing movies than Hollywood is.

Chew on *that*, MPAA!

Too many movie references pop into my head, from Young Frankenstein ("it's pronounced, "FRAW-ken-shteen") to Futurama. Do we really want ot give Richard Nixon's head a new body?

Yes, but you are wasting paper

ZIP it first -- use the encryption option for extra security. THEN print the resulting hex dump and shred it.

Deliver the key with a phone call.

Yeah...can you tell us where most of them originated? I'm betting China or India. Where the Certificates of Authenticity are...well...not always "authentic", shall we say? And yes, what you pay for in China or India is not always what you get. To say the least!

I'm highly skeptical of store brands as a whole. They're much cheaper than the national brands, and claim to be the same thing. But, as they're "supplements", FDA doesn't check. We should just trust CVS, Walgreens, etc, to be telling the truth, right? I mean, they're huge, honest companies and they distribute real medicines, so you know they are taking great care to make sure the stuff they sell is as advertised. Let's do a sniff test on that statement. Nope. Doesn't pass. I suppose the store brands *could* be legit, and I could be getting a great deal -- exact same, high quality multivitamins for 1/4 the cost of the national brand. But my spidey sense says, no. Rice flour and rat droppings are far more likely, especially since the package gives no indication of where the product originates, just "Distributed by CVS". Yeah, that in itself inspires a whole lot of confidence...NOT.

Hey Microsoft!

Pick a UI and stick to it! I'm getting very tired of having to relearn the entire UI whenever you make a new release.

Nope, I'm thinking from the point of view of someone who wants to win an election. Counting on ineligeable voters to show up is risky, and if I wanted to make sure my guy came out ahead, I wouldn't bet all the marbles on that scheme. I'd mess with the machines or the accounting software. Much cleaner and, if done right, leaves no trace. Or, I'd take advantage of defects in the voting system itself (hanging chads, for example).

Whatever you might think of political parties (and I probably share your feelings, but perhaps not about the same party), they employ some very smart people. Smart enough to realize that "voter fraud" is and always has been, a non-issue. Voter ID laws are about one thing and one thing only: raising the bar high enough so the people you don't want voting...can't. It's literacy tests all over again. To claim otherwise is to insult the intelligence of the people you're talking with.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and guess that he's not going to be getting that back...

Fraud by ineligeable voters is a ridiculously inefficient and costly way to rig an election. Unpredictable, too. Anyone wanting to fix an election would either mess with the voting machines or the totals if they wanted to guarantee success.

Occasioned by a weekend trip to the (bitingly frigid cold) Sunday River ski area this past weekend, I learned that TELSTAR 1 is still happily orbiting the earth. The US ground terminal was in Andover, Maine, not too far from Sunday River. It's now just a few equipment shelters and some dishes, but back in the day, there was a huge horn antenna inside a radome. The regional high school is named Telstar. I wonder if the students (or the administration, for that matter) realize the history behind the name...